Karen A. Weyler

Karen Weyler’s research and teaching interests are grounded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. She is particularly interested in the history of the book, the novel, literary periodicals, and ephemera of all kinds. She is the author of Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789-1814 (Iowa, 2004) and Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America, 1760-1815 (Georgia, 2013). With Robert Battistini and Michael Cody, she is editing The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition. Vol. 3: The Literary Magazine and Other Writings, 1803-1807 (forthcoming 2015 from Bucknell University Press).

In different ways, American Lazarus and "Face Zion Forward" contribute to the growing body of scholarship about the circumatlantic movement of people and ideas in the eighteenth century. 'Face Zion Forward" is a collection of pri...

The circumstances surrounding Mary Mebane's death in 1991—an anonymous death in a county welfare home, with a pauper's burial—are strongly reminiscent of the death of Zora Neale Hurston. Although Mebane never attained the stature that Hurston achieve...

As someone whose scholarly interests place her with one foot in the eighteenth century and one foot in the nineteenth century, I feel drawn to respond to whether feminist scholarship produced by early Americanists is different from that produced by s...

This issue of Studies in American Humor, focusing on early and antebellum American humor, takes us deep into the archives to explore the complicated relationships between humor and gender identity at different historical moments and in different genr...

In this essay, I focus on Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood's Dorval, novels suggestive of how the topos of coverture is explored in early American fiction with regard to bourgeois women. While discussions of...

In Public Sentiments, Glenn Hendler joins other critics who have recently challenged and complicated two long-standing tenets about the exercise of nineteenth-century American sentiment: first, that sentiment was primarily the province of women write...

Like Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture, Lori Merish in Sentimental Materialism locates nineteenth-century sentimentality in the
nexus of commodity consumption, but Merish productively complicates the relationships amo...

The excerpt quoted above, from a poem printed in pamphlet form in 1791, captures both the hope and the disappointment wrought by changing economic conditions in the newly formed United States
after the Revolution. "Speculation" and its companion vic...